H Is For Hawk by Helen Macdonald (2016, Grove Press; 320 pages) When naturalist and falconer Helen Macdonald lost her beloved father, she “thought [her] world was ending.” Seems apropos, then, that her journey from crippling grief to something resembling grace is on the wings of another deadly bird of prey--the notoriously prickly, and murderous, goshawk. In H Is for Hawk, you will meet Mabel, not your typical bloodthirsty specimen, as she is trained to hunt like the goshawks of yore. It is this brash, slightly mad undertaking that wrenches Macdonald free from despair, and brings her to a place where she can begin again. In H Is For Hawk -- which is on just about every Best Book of the Year list -- we also learn about the famed Arthurian novelist T.H. White, a kindred soul to Macdonald in certain ways. One of the things that endeared him to her was his “childish delight” with all things wild, something you’ll be hard-pressed not to experience as soon as you tap into this tome. This is a fantastic memoir, one that renders an indelible impression of a raptor’s fierce essence—and the author's own—with words that mimic feathers. I am amazed at this memoir! Find this title in our catalog: H is for Hawk Recommended by: Maite
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THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA -- an eater's manifesto that tells you exactly where your food comes from3/24/2016 The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Secrets Behind What You Eat by Michael Pollan (2007, Penguin; 450 pages) The question of what to have for dinner has confronted us since man discovered fire. But as Michael Pollan explains in this revolutionary book, how we answer it now, as the dawn of the twenty-first century, may determine our survival as a species. Packed with profound surprises, The Omnivore's Dilemma is changing the way Americans thing about the politics, perils, and pleasures of eating. This is a great read about food and the evolutions it has endured. Pollan describes it all, from industrial agriculture to sustainable farming to hunter-gatherer lifestyles. It's entertaining and readable, as well as very informative. Find this title in our catalog: The Omnivore's Dilemma Recommended by: Ann Mexico: The Cookbook by Margarita Carrillo Arronte (2014, Phaidon Press; 704 pages) I love cookbooks that take care of art businesses. And if they have a spectacular pink cover, all the better. This is a fantastic book about Mexican cuisine illustrated with 200 full-color photographs. It is really a bible that features 700 recipes from across the entire country of Mexico, taking care to explain the rich diversity and flavors of its cuisine. The book is the result of 30 years of research. Each recipe includes notes on recipe origins, ingredients, and techniques. If you want to learn how to cook Tamales de Chocolate, o enmoladas, and many more dishes, this is your book! Find this title in our catalog: Mexico: The Cookbook Recommended by: Maite Drawing Lab For Mixed-Media Artists by Carla Sonheim (2010, Quarry Books; 144 pages) Carla Sonheim is an artist and creativity workshop instructor known for her fun and innovative projects and techniques designed to help adult students recover a more childlike, playful approach to creating. Many of these innovative ideas have been collected in this fantastic and inspiring book. The book offers a year's worth of assignments, projects, ideas and techniques that will introduce more creativity and nonsense into anyone's life. If you are in the spot of mind and life where you really want to work on creativity, this is the book for you. The book tells you over and over again that there is no right or wrong result, and you gain skills and confidence that allow you to either start your work or take it to a whole new level. From imaginary creatures to paper dolls or Modigliani style portraits, this book is a sure source of fun and great creativity. Find this title in our catalog: Drawing Lab For Mixed-Media Artists Recommended by: Maite Gratitude by Oliver Sacks (2015, Knopf; 64 pages) During the last few months of his live, Dr. Oliver Sacks wrote a set of essays in which he movingly explored his feelings about the medical and human drama of illness, about completing a life and coming to terms with his own death. “It is the fate of every human being," he wrote, “to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.” Gratitude is a book composed of four essays that form an ode to the uniqueness of each human being and to gratitude for the gift of life. The essays were written in the last two years of the author's life, when he was facing aging, illness and death. It is remarkable in its grace and clarity. Each one of the essays is pure gold. I especially enjoyed the final piece in the book, titled, “Sabbath,” which ends like this: “ And now, weak, short of breath, my once firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts (…) drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one's life as well, when one can feel that one's work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.” A must read, an absolutely piece of gold. Find this title in our catalog: Gratitude Recommended by: Maite The Kitchen Counter Cooking School by Kathleen Flynn (2012, Penguin Books; 304 pages) The author of the New York Times bestseller The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry tells the inspiring story of how she helped nine others find their inner cook. After graduating from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, writer Kathleen Flinn returned with no idea what to do next, until one day at a supermarket she watched a woman loading her cart with ultraprocessed foods. Flinn's "chefternal" instinct kicked in: she persuaded the stranger to reload with fresh foods, offering her simple recipes for healthy, easy meals. The Kitchen Counter Cooking School includes practical, healthy tips that boost readers' culinary self-confidence, and strategies to get the most from their grocery dollar, and simple recipes that get readers cooking. I like to cook; this is an entertaining and thoughtful book on basic food and kitchen skills, warmly written with humor and intelligence. Find this title in our catalog: The Kitchen Counter Cooking School Recommended by: Ann Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting by Pamela Druckerman (2014, Penguin Books; 432 pages) Fatherly magazine calls this a book in which the author “recounts her experiences raising a child in Paris, where she found French kids to be way more well behaved, polite, autonomous, and willing to eat food that isn't beige and shaped like dinosaurs than their American counterparts. If that's not enough to pique your curiosity, consider this: According to Druckerman, French parents have social lives and do things like sleep and have sex.” The book is a great read. I am childless and I enjoyed it tremendously. The author, an American journalist, describes with honesty how she discovered “the secret behind France's astonishingly well-behaved children.” The book is funny, honest, smart, insightful and provocative, one of those readings that you can't put down. The writer engages the reader with her prose and her premise about how parents of all cultures should be able to learn from one another. The fact that she is an American in France brings us a fantastic bicultural point of view. From the book: "When I talk to American parents about sleep, science rarely comes up. Faced with so many different and seemingly valid sleep philosophies, the one they ultimately choose seems like a matter of taste. But once I get French parents talking, they mention sleep cycles, circadian rhythms, and sommeil paradoxal. (…) When French parents pause, they do it consistently and confidently. They're making informed decisions based on their understanding of how babies sleep. Behind this is an important philosophical difference. French parents believe it's their job to gently teach babies how to sleep well (…). They don't view being up half the night with an eight month old as a sign of parental commitment.(...) The French believe, as we do, that their children are beautiful and special. But they also realize that some things about them are just biological. Before we assume that our own children sleep like no others, we should probably think about science.” I recommend this book to both parents and non parents. It is a joyful reading and also a great way to learn about parenting in different cultures. Find this title in our catalog: Bringing Up Bebe Recommended by: Maite Another Way to Be: Selected Works Of Rosario Castellanos Edited & Translated by Myralyn F. Allgood (1990, University of Georgia Press; 192 pages) ¨Oh, may sleep elude our brows, may friendship pierce our hearts like thorns, and may songs offend our mouths, as long as the hands of this woman, this Indian mother, remain unable to give her child bread, light, and justice.¨ This book is a multifaceted selection of the writings of thinker, writer, diplomat and feminist Rosario Castellanos, one of Mexico's major literary figures before her untimely death in 1974. Poet, novelist, journalist, philosopher, and diplomat, she was a woman whose life and art reflected her commitment to the problems and promise of her native land. She was the daughter of a wealthy landowner and saw during her childhood the clash of cultures and social classes in tradition-bound communities where women were condemned to lives of submission, and Indians were regarded as nothing more than chattel. From these experiences she formed her opinion and her views of the world as a place where races and individuals are caught up in an ongoing struggle for justice and dignity, for "another way to be human and free." The book opens with selections from her poetry in both Spanish and English. It includes selections from her prize-winning fiction and closes with a group of essays that reflect her intellectual debt to Simone Weil and Simone de Beauvoir and the kinship she felt with Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson. Together, the selections of Another Way to Be give a rich and full sense of the diverse talents of a remarkable writer and woman. She wrote: ¨There must be another way... Another way to be human and free Another way to be (Poesía 316) ¨A champion of women's rights and an outspoken critic of the oppression of the Mexican Indian by the Ladino (white people), Castellanos wrote highly personal works that drew deeply upon her experience as a white, Mexican female in Chiapas. The struggles of the natives against harsh social conditions were apparent to her from childhood. Allgood here translates and assembles selections of Castellanos's poetry, fiction, and essays representing these themes. The poetry, presented bilingually, moves from her earlier intellectual works to lighter works and deals with basic human concerns. The fiction emphasizes the parallel conflicts of men versus women and non-Indian versus Indian. The essays, written for the Mexican paper Excelsior , reveal her perceptive views on a range of issues. This is the only work of Castellanos currently available in English, making it a worthwhile addition to both Spanish literature and women's studies collections. - Mary Ellen Beck, Troy P.L., N.Y. This title is not yet available in our catalog. To order this title through Interlibrary Loan: Another Way to Be Recommended by: Maite Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson (2013, Grove Press; 240 pages) This is a vivid and courageous memoir and an autobiography of a woman who wasn’t well loved by her mother. The book starts like this: “When my mother was angry with me, which was often, she said, ‘The Devil led us to the wrong crib.'” Jeanette Winterson, a British author perhaps not very well known in the USA (sadly so) has written some of the most acclaimed books of the last three decades, including her first novel Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, and my favorite, Lighthousekeeping. With this witty, acute, fierce, celebratory and moving book, the author continues sharing her search for belonging, for love, for a home, all wrapped up in a continuous question of what is the meaning of identity in a person’s life. This memoir is the chronicle of a life’s work to find happiness, a book that stabs you in the heart with episodes like when the author explains how she was left all night on the doorstep by a mother who kicked her out of the house at sixteen because she was in love with a woman. "Why be happy when you could be normal?" is the real-life question for her of her adopted mother, who previously had attempted to exorcise her sexuality. The book is full of stories that cut your air and leave you cold until the author’s sense of humor allows you to breathe again, a bit uneasily, sharing the pain that this memoir exhales. It is a deeply moving experience to read it. From The Guardian: “Jeanette Winterson's memoir is written sparsely and hurriedly; it is sometimes so terse it's almost in note form. The impression this gives is not of sloppiness, but a desperate urgency to make the reader understand. This is certainly the most moving book of Winterson's I have ever read, and it also feels like the most turbulent and the least controlled. In the end, the emotional force of the second half makes me suspect that the apparent artlessness of the first half is a ruse; that, in a Lilliputian fashion, what appears to be a straight narrative of her early life is actually tying the reader down with a thousand imperceptible guy ropes, so that when she unleashes a terrible sorrow, there is no escaping it and no looking away." Find this title in our catalog: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Recommended by: Maite The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail by Óscar Martinez (2014, Verso; 224 pages) One day a few years ago, 300 migrants were kidnapped between the remote desert towns of Altar, Mexico, and Sasabe, Arizona. A local priest got 120 released, many with broken ankles and other marks of abuse, but the rest vanished. Óscar Martínez, a young writer from El Salvador, was in Altar soon after the abduction, and his account of the migrant disappearances is only one of the harrowing stories he garnered from two years spent traveling up and down the migrant trail from Central America and across the US border. More than a quarter of a million Central Americans make this increasingly dangerous journey each year, and each year as many as 20,000 of them are kidnapped. Martínez writes in powerful, unforgettable prose about clinging to the tops of freight trains; finding respite, work and hardship in shelters and brothels; and riding shotgun with the border patrol. Illustrated with stunning full-color photographs, The Beast is the first book to shed light on the harsh new reality of the migrant trail in the age of the narcotraficantes. I listened to the author of this book -- a young journalist and writer from El Salvador named Óscar Martinez -- on NPR and I was totally shocked by what he was taking about: his eight journeys on top of the freight trains known as La Bestia. La Bestia is the only way for hundreds of migrants to cross every year from different countries in Central America, across Mexico and up to the U. S. Border.It is not a pleasant journey and it is not pleasant reading in the sense that the reader will have to learn about gang violence, kidnapping, human trafficking, government corruption, rape, and the physical dangers that the protagonists of this treacherous adventure have to confront riding non-stop, for days, on top of a train. The reasons why a growing number of Guatemalans, Hondurans, Salvadorans and Nicaraguans are taking this horrible risk is very well known for those who choose to be informed. Once read, this book will never leave you, and will most likely change your perception about the “immigration” issue. Find this title in our catalog: The Beast Recommended by: Maite |
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